Growing up, Black Friday was an event. My entire family would pile into a couple of cars and drive to the mall on Thanksgiving night. Outside of Walmart, Target and Dillard’s, families would be in line, bundled up in coats and waiting for the doors to open. Once they finally did, everyone would flood inside, tearing the store apart in search of deals. Black Friday was a zoo—you could see someone cursing out a child for grabbing the last bottle of nail polish or yelling at an underpaid, overworked cashier holding up a line of grumbling customers. The day was known for bringing out the worst in people with the best steals of the year. Although, in recent years, the Black Friday mania has dwindled severely for many reasons.

For one, brick-and-mortar stores have increasingly had to contend with rising online empires such as Amazon. Many people now prefer online shopping for everything at one emporium over the inconvenience of heading into multiple stores to find what they’re looking for. As a result, most stores that prospered in the past few decades have had to raise their prices to survive. In addition to this shift in consumerism, younger generations have begun to popularize alternative forms of acquiring their goods—one of these being thrifting.

There was a time in high school when I felt like the clothing stores that I had grown up loving weren’t updating their merchandise fast enough to fit my evolving taste. I would stop by Hollister or Aéropostale and feel like they were still stocking items that were trendy in the early 2010s, and I was over it. As a result of this, thrifting became something of a hobby for me. I could find good quality, unique pieces of clothing for a fraction of the price in stores. In addition, I found that the clothes people donated helped me to figure out my style, which led to me being more intentional about how I spent my money overall. I was starting to become more educated about the harmful effects of fast fashion, like many other kids in my generation, and could more easily notice that all manufactured items aren’t made with the same amount of care.

Additionally, social media platforms such as TikTok have greatly influenced the life cycle and range of fashion choices, causing younger people to have more radically different aesthetics than possibly ever before. When a swipe is the only thing necessary to influence you, of course it’s easy to discover more style options and hold them up to the ones you already know for comparison. The proliferation of social media, connecting more people and spreading more advertisements over time, has ultimately exposed us to many more ideas and opinions. In turn, this has influenced what we decide to buy and not to buy.

Without harping on wasteful consumerism under capitalism too much, I’d like to posit that the substantial decline of Black Friday began after the initial COVID-19 pandemic peak in 2020. Schools were on lockdown and people were meeting outside from six feet away, if not over Zoom. Malls all over the country gradually began to shut down in the aftermath of the virus, with mall vacancies in 2023 at their highest in the past 15 years. A study found that only two in five shoppers last year intended to holiday shop in person at malls, with most survey respondents preferring online shopping.

Generally, the closure of malls coincides with the lack of third places and the rising digitalization of certain spaces. While I may have spent the formative years of my childhood walking around the mall with my friends on the weekend, many people younger than I spend their free time in their bedroom, talking to their friends on a headset from a Robloxian world relatively similar to the one right outside. This is not to claim that this move to a more technology-focused world is bad, but it is certainly a shift from what we’ve known. Our increasing preference for the digital world translates to how we spend our free time and money.

I must say it makes me a bit sad to see what seems like the demise of Black Friday as I knew it in real time. It’s probably for the best that people aren’t trampling each other for a flat-screen TV in aisle 16 of Walmart all that much anymore, although I do think I’ll miss the treasure-hunting sense of excitement and camaraderie that being in such a chaotic environment brought when I was younger. That being said, I remain interested to see what the future of consumerism has in store for us—literally.